Mikhail Antonov

Russia is not the only country where judges and politicians depreciate human rights. But the persistence of political justice in Russian law suggests that this depreciation is an accident but might be a recurrence of conservative tradition which expectedly has an impact also on Russian law. In imperial Russia, the celebrated formula "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Popular Democracy" excellently verbalized this feature of this political culture. This formula became one of the cornerstones of official Imperial ideology legitimizing the autocracy through references to Russian communitarian traditions. In the latest 2020 constitutional amendments this formula crept in a disguised way also into the Constitution. The conservative argument of distinctiveness is frequently referred to as the rationale for crafting exceptions to constitutional non-discrimination principles as they are applied to religious, sexual and other minorities. This argument can work very efficiently to persuade the public opinion which is often against “premature” social and cultural changes and is skeptical as to narratives about universal human rights.